Donald Kagan, Yale's great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.

Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.

This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."

Not so now. Mr. Kagan received a long standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. Heading into retirement, he has been feted as a beloved and popular teacher and Yale icon. The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in education.

Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day at his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won."

ENLARGE

Zina Saunders

He means across academia, but that is also true in his case. Mr. Kagan resigned the deanship in April 1992, lobbing a parting bomb at the faculty that bucked his administration. His plans to create a special Western Civilization course at Yale—funded with a $20 million gift from philanthropist and Yale alum Lee Bass, who was inspired by the 1990 lecture—blew up three years later amid a political backlash. "I still cry when I think about it," says Mr. Kagan.

As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says, "you can't find members of the faculty who have different opinions." I point at him. "Not anymore!" he says and laughs. The allure of "freedom" and "irresponsibility" were too strong to resist, he says.

His sharp tongue and easy sense of humor hearken to the Brooklyn of his youth. Born in 1932 in a Lithuanian shtetl, Mr. Kagan was raised in Brownsville, which was then a working-class Jewish neighborhood. He rooted for the Yankees on Brooklyn Dodgers turf—"everything you need to know about him," as his son Robert, the neoconservative writer, once said. He was a high school fullback. Mr. Kagan is personally warm, always tough and occasionally smart alecky. Imagine Robert DeNiro as an eminent conservative scholar of ancient Athens. He has no patience for "nonsense" or "wrong ideas." He's a guy who'll tell you what's what and that's that. Generations of faculty and students came away bruised from Kagan encounters.

The tussles over course offerings and campus speech of course speak to something larger. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in " Pericles of Athens" (1991), is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive.

These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety. If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."

As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. "Crisis suggests it might recover," Mr. Kagan shoots back. "Maybe it's had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy."

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law. Mr. Kagan, who grew up a Truman Democrat, says that when he was young the U.S. needed to redress an imbalance by emphasizing equality. The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then "it was all about merit," he says.

The 1960s brought a shift and marked his own political awakening. Teaching at Cornell, Mr. Kagan watched armed black students occupy a university building in 1969. The administration caved to their demands without asking them to give up their rifles and bandoliers. He joined Allan Bloom and other colleagues in protest. In the fall of that year, he moved to Yale. Bloom ended up at the University of Chicago and in 1987 published "The Closing of the American Mind," his best-selling attack on the shortcomings of higher education.

In the decades since, faculties have gained "extraordinary authority" over universities, Mr. Kagan says. The changes in the universities were mirrored in the society at large. "The tendency in this century and in the previous century at least has been toward equality of result and every other kind of equality that could be claimed without much regard for liberty," he says. "Right now the menace is certainly to liberty."

Over lunch at the private Mory's club last week, we marvel over the first-ever NCAA championship for Yale's hockey team, the oldest program in the country. "Unbelievable!" says Mr. Kagan with the gleam of a sports obsessive. In 1987, he stepped in for a year to direct Yale's athletic department—probably the only classics professor ever to hold the post anywhere. His first initiative was to call to disband the NCAA or take Yale out of it. "I wish I had," he says. "It's so disgusting, it's so hypocritical, it's so wicked. The NCAA is just a trade organization meant to increase profits."

Whether athletics, democracy or war are the topics of discussion, Mr. Kagan can offer examples from the ancients. His lifelong passion is Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War—the epic clash between those former allies, militaristic Sparta and democratic Athens, that closed out the fifth century B.C.

As Thucydides wrote, people go to war out of "honor, fear and interest." War, he also said, "is a violent teacher." Another enduring lesson from him, says Mr. Kagan, is "that you can expect people, whatever they may be, to seek to maximize their power"—then a slight pause—"unless they're Europeans and have checked their brains at the door, so mortified are they, understandably, by what happened to them in the 20th century. They can't be taken seriously."

These days the burden of seriousness among free states falls on America, a fickle and unusual power. The Romans had no qualms about quashing their enemies, big or small. While the U.S. won two global conflicts and imposed and protected the current global order, the recent record shows failed or inconclusive engagements in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Some would argue that free societies are too soft to fight brutal wars too long. Mr. Kagan offers culture and political leadership as an explanation. "We're a certain kind of culture which makes it hard for us to behave rationally when the rational thing is to be tough," he says. "We can do it when we're scared to death and there seem to be no alternatives. When it's time to nail down something, we very often sneak away."

The protection and distance offered by two oceans gives America the idea—or delusion—of being able to stay out of the world's problems. Mr. Kagan also wonders about possible "geocultural" shifts at play. A hundred years ago, most people worked the land for themselves. Today they work for a paycheck, usually in an office. "Fundamentally we are dependent on people who pay our salaries," says Mr. Kagan. "In the liberal era, in our lifetime, we have come more to expect it is the job of the government to provide for the needs that we can't provide. Everything is negotiable. Everything is subject to talk." Maybe that has weakened the American will.

Also don't forget, says Mr. Kagan, "unsubtle Christianity" and its strong strain of pacifism. "Who else has a religion filled with the notion 'turn the other cheek'?" he asks. "Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you're gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball."

In 2000, Mr. Kagan and his younger son, Frederick, a military historian and analyst, published "While America Sleeps." The book argued for the reversal of the Clinton Cold War peace dividend to meet unforeseen but inevitable threats to come. The timing was uncanny. A year later, 9/11 forced the Pentagon to rearm.

With the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. is slashing defense again. "We do it every time," Mr. Kagan says. "Failing to understand the most elementary childish fact, which is: If you don't want trouble with somebody else, be sure he has something to be afraid of."

Brownsville, not Thucydides, taught him that. "Any kid who grows up in a relatively tough neighborhood gets quick early lessons in what the realities are," he says. His 1995 book, "On the Origins of War," made a moral and strategic case to exert as much effort and money to safeguard peace as to win a war.

Thucydides identified man's potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant or irresponsible to care. "When you allow yourself to think of it, you don't know whether you are going to laugh or cry," he says.

The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on. "There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population that buys into" a strong and free society, he says. "That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature."

Wow, a gathering of highly erudite racists and bigots. A gathering of people who don't have the courtesy and decency to acknowledge they stand on the shoulders of giants from other cultures. A gathering of people whose "Western" philosophy is plagiarized or based on inventions of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Chinese, Arabs and goodness knows who else from the fog of history. A gathering of ungrateful, shameless humans who walk around their neighborhood and think they've seen the world.

In the ultimate analysis, a gathering of small men, unworthy of the great deeds of their own ancestors.

It's nice to see a champion of free speech in the modern age. The politically correct culture is destroying America, as we would rather cave in to a few outspoken activists than stand up for what's morally and ethically decent. Colleges were meant to be the pillar of free speech and the free sharing of ideas, now they are a playground for indoctrinating Liberal politics into our youth.

Democracy in the end does lead to tyranny, and as we willfully hand over more and more of our Freedoms to the government to "feel safe," the closer we come to the day when we have no more to surrender. Something is seriously wrong when you can watch a movie like V for Vendetta and see parallels with the direction our society is heading.

I applaud Mr. Kagan's rise from the slums of Brownsville to an elite position at Yale. But he should have stuck to his study of the Greeks, and not tried to mess around in politics, especially the sort of politics in which he engaged, and the allegiance he had to Leo Strauss, that third-rate hack and Machiavellian rabble-rouser.

But no, little Donnie Kagan joined with his reactionary buddies, Wolfowitz, Perle, and the others in this little Chicago School daisy chain and wrote a manifesto: The Project for a New American Century, which advocated invasion of other countries so that we could become a world hegemon. Do you now see what consequences you have brought about? Aren't you the least bit ashamed of your hubris? Surely, you know what that means, you little schlepper. I can only hope that your garden of retirement is filled with weeds, and that nemesis will overtake you and your ilk. You know what nemesis is, don't you, Mr. Greek scholar? It's what slaps down those who think they're too smart for their own good. I hope that bad karma will continue to follow you, Donnie--you and that useless brother of yours.

Last week when I wrote to the NYT that our two ocean sense of protection was delusional I was trashed. When I wrote again, selected as an NYT "Pick" stating that we should decisively crush our enemies, reminding that the Nazis, Fascists and militarists of Japan "got the message" (we wiped them out), again I was trashed and mocked. And years ago, I wrote that Mr. Clinton, who naively believed in the so-called peace dividend was dismantling the greatest deterrent to tyranny, again, I was called out and reviled for my ignorance. There is no peace. There is no peace dividend. There is no longer freedom of speech only political correctness. And out sourcing has dismantled the greatest manufacturing base the world has ever known. Ingenuity has been crushed and entrepreneurism, research and development is all but gone. The only nation to have placed men on the moon now has space agency that relies upon the Russians for deliveries to the International Space Station. Is that another product of the peace dividend? There is no longer a sense of adventure and certainly there is fear of bold action. We need leadership...and we need colleges and professors that can educate and inspire the leaders for our future....or we won't have a future.

Ditching the Politically Correct, acculturating 'minority inclusive', affirmative action policies for a pure meritocracy and affirming once and for all the primacy of Western (i.e., enlightenment-derived) values at home would be a good start to getting out of our current civilisational bankruptcy.

Mercantilism must be balanced with a moral concern for the aggregate. Individualistic materialism as the sole measure of self-esteem leads to societal suicide. I wish the West would wake up as its crisis is, in my opinion, very profound: it is a crisis of ideal.

To use a Christian analogy: Not only are the merchants back into the temple, they've defecated all over it !

Thank God that neocon chicken hawk warmongers like Kagan never achieved political influence or power in this country. It was not his children being sent off to war and thermonuclear war would have wiped out all western civilization. Off to never never land, Dr. Kagan, never to be seen again and good riddance.

Perhaps the preservation of Western Civilization can only occur within indigenous people originating from Europe. Perhaps people not members of this tribe lack the primal connection necessary to participate in and be members of a group primarily defined by ethnicity, race, culture, etc. Perhaps people simply cannot be joined together by ideas and institutions alone. Perhaps people really do need to be with their own people, their own tribe. Already, one sees a gathering of kindred spirits who are becoming connected and reconnected to their people, i.e., people originating from and derived from indigenous Europeans. We should not be surprised. It's a good thing. The world has always been this way. What the people not part of Western Civilization will do in the new era is difficult to know.

"Who else has a religion filled with the notion 'turn the other cheek'?" he asks. "Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you're gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball." "

Sometimes staying out of wars makes a lot of sense. One example, World War I. It effectively started by accident, and the resulting treaty arrangements resulted in Britain and Germany declaring war on each other. America stayed out as long as it could and helped turn the tide but avoided most of the needless losses of the war (which significantly weakened Britain and France forever more).

Great article. I got a laugh overr his "unnuanced Christianity" remark, complaining that we turn the other cheek too much. As if Christians are not sufficiently warlike. Let me introduce you to the Scots-Irish. Let me introduce you to George W. Bush. Ha! Somebody at Yale Divinity School should point out that there are only two cheeks, and then what? We will smack you one.

The likes of Thucydides and Herodotus are far to violent and politically in-corect for today's progressive youth. And just think they would have awoke to the fact by now that they voted in Cylon rather than Pericles as Tyrant.Sadly to say most of our dumbed down youth will go to their grave thinking the Five Ephors were Honey Bobo's family.

I am continually amazed by the low quality of WSJ responders to these topics. Who would have thought that so many Red-Necks were actually reading this paper? It might be useful if one needed to pass some kind of basic qualification test in civics in order to post stuff here.

So says Kagan. Just ask Gorbachev how well that worked out for the USSR. No one is arguing that the US should disarm itself, nor is anyone arguing we should continue to spend $20 billion a month on defense build up after the Afghanistan war ends (IF it ends). So what's the point of such a blanket, straw man argument???

Although I am completely sympathetic with Kagan's desire to re-introduce a core curriculum in western culture and political history (too bad he couldn't steamroll the extreme lefties on this one, though I think that pendulum is definitely swinging back), the rest of his comments sound just exactly like a cranky old knee-jerk conservative.

I don't mean to be dismissive of Kagan -- I'm certain that his thoughts and comments are radically more nuanced and intelligent than the typical Faux-news cherry picking going on in this article (so much so that after posting this comment I'm going to Google any editorials by him).

But holy cow, after the WSJ staff got finished with the interview transcript, it reads like an interview with one of those curmudgeons from the Muppet Show. A bunch of trivialized cheerleading for right-wingers, but not exactly a thouht-provoking or insightful experience for WSJ readers.

The 80-year-old scholar is an product of his living age. No standard principal is in history. I rather prefer Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's 18th century had not so competitive in scholars environments than Mr. Kagans. There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population a strong and free society. That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature. That is wrong, that is a scholar's arrogance.Last judgement is not rely on scholars, it is each individual's judgement, Mr.Kagan knew that.

There are pockets of hope. The Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, New York, similar efforts at Colgate, Princeton, U of Rochester and other colleges are trying to rescue student for the abyss of the pap their schools are promoting and teaching. And these efforts to rekindle the knowledge, appreciation and embrace of Western history and thought are working.

....Also don't forget, says Mr. Kagan, "unsubtle Christianity" and its strong strain of pacifism. "Who else has a religion filled with the notion 'turn the other cheek'?" he asks. "Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you're gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball."

The USA had exclusivity on the nuclear bomb for about 5 years after WWII. We could have bombed the USSR into submission and we could have put every nation in the world under US rule. We were literally the only one standing at the end of that war and we had the ultimate weapon.

Kagen is right. Unsubtle Christianity is the driving force in the USA. And the rest of the world should be glad we are a Christian nation not a Nazi or Islamic or Communist nation. Only America with its unsubtle Christianity would have forgiven our enemies and rebuilt our enemies vs. dropping bombs on them and demanding reparations.

"Who ever heard of such a thing?" No man could have come up with "turn the other cheek." Only God could do that. Liberty declines in direct proportion to multiculturalism. The worst thing for not just the USA but for mankind is when Obama said "we are not a Christian nation." Liberty and democracy and freedom will die when we are not a Christian nation.

A wise man speaks. "Universities . . . are failing students and hurting American democracy. . . . Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy." His last book, "While America Sleeps", was written in 2000 and then 9/11 woke America up in an alarming, brutal way. Will the macabre Boston Debacle wake us up? Regrettably, it doesn't appear so.

Meanwhile the dysfunctional politicians from both parties all of a sudden reached an agreement over the FAA mess because they might miss the opportunity to go home on yet another paid vacation to kiss the babies and tell their constituents how "the other side is at fault". And the majority of voters, products of the "cultural void" at America's universities, can't wait to continue claiming their federal entitlements. What a travesty!

None of us would have enjoyed living in Golden Age Athens. A society that viewed slavery as normal, blasphemy a capital offense, and a society that engaged in disastrous overseas adventures, subjugation of its neighbors, and torture and mutilation of captives. Prof. Kagan, a modern Thucydides, an outcast of sorts, loves his Greeks too much to accept their flaws.

"The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in education."

One can only hope that the transformation proceeds rapidly. Education at all levels has declined dramatically in the past 40 years, but at the university level that deterioration has reached an existential crisis stage as far as the nation is concerned. It is a safe bet that not only the average IQ but the identifiable diversity quotient among the Yale faculty has suffered serious reduction with Mr. Kagan's departure.

Guilty! But we try to rise above all that, and keep our tongue firmly planted in our cheek. It is not that we are free of whatever ails our souls, it is how we deal with it. As to standing on shoulders, you forgot the Jews. Not being a complete naturalist, I would admit the possibility of the entry of the Creator into history in some form and in some time and place, not to completely divert the conversation into anarchy. In other words, it is not exclusively the shoulders of dead people from numberless tribes upon whom we rely for the next idea.

I suspect your understanding of history is limited to the last 50 years or so. Look up what started WWI which extended on to WW II. The US was no where near the start of that cataclysm but you'll find some interesting players in there and they're still trying to blow up western civilization. Mr. Kagan has the long view of history and the depth of the understanding that brings with it. Reactionary? Your spittle is still drying on your post.

I feel that most of these commentators missed the point of Dr K, that a country must be prepared to fight to win, the operative word being "prepared". Nowhere did I sense he advocated a belligerent stance with other nations. To the contrary, since WWII, the US has jumped into conflict unprepared militarily and ideologically in way to many parts of the world leaving dead American youth and a moral position in the dust.

"Perhaps people not members of this tribe lack the primal connection necessary to participate in and be members of a group primarily defined by ethnicity, race, culture, etc."

If you define the group that way, then of course you have to prioritize blood descent above all else. That's certainly the Left's tendency. I'd suggest that this is an area where emulating the Left's Inquisitors doesn't serve the Dark Enlightenment.

If you look for enemies as your primary focus, you'll always find them in the expected places. If you look for friends as your primary focus, you will find them in both expected and unexpected places. Nothing has a 100% record, but look at a key defining point for our civilization, and what happened to Christianity in Rome. Looking for friends can pack a serious long-term wallop.

"Perhaps people simply cannot be joined together by ideas and institutions alone."

Or maybe it's even simpler. Perhaps when you remove the foundations that allowed this very thing to survive and flourish for 200 years, the structures built on it collapse.

Paul (Great name) - you are quite correct that Christians learned to fight for noble causes. When Jesus spoke of being struck on the cheek, he was talking about the things that might happen when spreading the truth. I do not recall any statements from Christ to sit back and do nothing while watching somebody being beaten to death in front of you. Peter carried a sword when Christ was arrested and could use it very well. One final point to make is your insult to the Irish. I would like an apology.

Paul - Thanks for your reply. I was half kidding about the Scots-Irish comment. I don't mind it so much but a true Scotsman would never accept an apology that went through an Irishman. The Scots ere a mysterios people with great strength and a great drink of the barley. Trust them with my life I would - but they never seem to return borrowed tools. I'm sure that a fine Scotsman would like to reply to my truth.

Kathleen, just for discussion, how did Gorbachev get into the conversation? Are you saying he didn't spend enough or spent too much? What exactly didn't work out for Gorbachev?Did you read the original transcripts? How do you know there is cherry picking?

Actually, don't answer. Your opinions are already loaded to some weird side that I don't think anything you say further will be enlightening at all.

You miss the single point...Successful societies that lasted for hundreds of years were respected and feared. The very tribal nature of the Mid-East today is testing that resolve.

A really well thought out strategy is to be strong...but work diplomatically not to exercise the strenght. There is no other choice if you wish to preserve our special freedoms, than building respect (NOT Like or Love) in the other global GeoEconomic entities with which the US completes.

Mr Kagan is suggesting that if we REALLY study Western Civilization...or any formerly ruling civilization, we will see how they rose, how they prospered and how they fell. This is taught, not experienced.

In other words..if we don't...then history will just repeat itself and the generations in decline will never know from whence they came, until it's too late.

Yasuaki Torrii - I was just wondering if you had read Julius Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars. I mean - he has to be unbiased and was obviously on the scene when things happened. You dismiss Mr. Kagan's work so easily and only respond with Gibbon. Mr. Kagan's work will be on my shelf till I'm dead.(On the spelling of Torrii -- do you put two hearts over the eyes?)

Precisely!! The state exists to serve the citizens. When the citizens abdicate their responsibility to participate in the management of THEIR state, the state no longer has a defined purpose or direction. It will then become the instrument of those who will use it to dominate the people to whom the state formerly belonged.

Kagan is spot on when he calls out American society for being ignorant or irresponsible. Ask any 15 people on the street in any city or town in the US what are the three branches of government and see what answer you get. You can also further enlighten yourself about public ignorance by asking the same people....or others if you feel lucky....."What are the roles and responsibilities of the three branches of government."

Time was....even a first grader could answer those questions. Today, many college graduates haven't a clue. "Not important information."

Perhaps living most of his adult life in a country where Americans were generous, proud of their heritage, and Presidents (and their appointed Cabinet Members) presented American core values to the world, helped shape Professor Kagan’s opinion.

Perhaps living in an age where self-determination was encouraged, willingness to work was the ‘measure of a man’, achievement of excellence was rewarded, and failure to pay one’s debt was shameful helped shape Professor Kagan’s opinion.

Many who share Professor Kagan’s opinions are dismissed as “Angry Old White Guys”. Not “Angry” – Sad, disappointed that 200 years of sacrifice are being so carelessly squandered. Don’t confuse ‘anger’, with ‘determination’.

Liberals already say things like that, Mitch. They degrade and insult the Fouding Fathers because they held slaves, a wide spread practice at the time. They ignore attempts to end slavery and lie about the 3/5ths clause - or maybe they're too stupid to understand it - as an attempt to show their moral superiority. They're the least moral people in history, ruining entire cities and communities with their policies while wagging their limp fingers at the likes of Jefferson. In short, they kiss Al Sharpton's butt while disparaging people like Mr. Kagan. Truly disgusting people.

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